Agile Practice in a DevOps World

Editor's Notes

• #2: Some of the photographs in here are my original work for the Ralwegians: Faces of Raleigh project. They don’t always have anything to do with the slide. Fun times!
• #6: This isn’t just a problem for Engineers to solve. This is about full organizational alignment. Leadership has a crucial role to play.
• #9: coined by John Willis to describe the pillars of a successful devops culture
• #11: This is one of the places you start once you understand your culture. At this point, the tools can start to stitch together an automation fabric for Devops. Tools for release management, provisioning, configuration management, systems integration, monitoring and control, and orchestration become important pieces in building a Devops fabric.
• #12: It's tempting to jump straight to writing automation scripts but to do so without a full appreciation of your current state is suicide. Andon & Kanban boards to show KPI’s and visualize workflow
• #15: A successful Devops implementation will measure everything it can as often as it can… performance metrics, process metrics, and even people metrics.
• #16: Creating a culture where people share ideas and problems is critical. sharing Devops success stories helps others. It also attracts top talent. Who wouldn’t want to work for Etsy? Stakeholder demos as part of culture.
• #18: focus is on all business value streams that are enabled by IT outcomes: never passing a known defect to downstream work centers never allowing local optimization to create global degradation always seeking to increase flow always seeking to achieve profound understanding of the system
• #19: outcomes: understanding and responding to all customers, internal and external shortening and amplifying all feedback loops embedding knowledge where we need it.
• #20: is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from failure understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery. outcomes: allocating time for the improvement of daily work creating rituals that reward the team for taking risks introducing faults into the system to increase resilience stop packing the schedule! play it loose, leave room for experimentation & speculative work.
• #21: If you only deploy every week because it’s hard, commit to doing it every day. The pain will prioritize understanding and automation. What was hard becomes easy. Soon you’ll be deploying multiple times per day.
• #22: This isn’t just about developers. This isn’t just about developers and operations. All business units need to be aligned around a common goal. Leaders have an enormous responsibility to achieve and maintain tight alignment. A butterfly flaps its wings in finance, and a new feature fails to ship on time from Engineering.
• #23: You can’t create culture. Ping pong isn’t culture; it’s a perk. Your values are the compass by which all decisions are made, all conflicts resolved. Values drive behaviors. Behaviors, when they become common & practice in absence of management, become culture.
• #24: NO! DevOps doesn’t prescribe any methodologies. Agile has a strong foundation of values, principles, and various methodologies that can apply directly within DevOps. We can play well together!
• #25: Slow your roll! DevOps is a grassroots movement, pushed from the bottom-up by engineers. Not all are enthused about Scrum.
• #27: Effective feedback loops are a great part of scrum. Standup and Retrospectives both serve this roll in different but effective ways.
• #30: How things get into a service is well-defined, via an API. What we expect to come out of the service is well-defined, kind of like Definition of Done. What happens inside of the box is not meant to be visible or touchable by people outside of the box. Sound like an independent, autonomous cross-functional product team?
• #32: The Phoenix Project is probably the best way to make this connection. Once you see it, decades of learned lessons present themselves. We learn more about software projects today from Goldratt & Deming in DevOps.
• #33: This mantra changes how we think of team structure, how we think of work being passed “over the wall”. Why is there even a wall? Org alignment must be strong. Technical decisions made around getting better at this. “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”
• #34: DevOps and Dogma don’t get along. DevOps and Agile do. Everything you do needs to support satisfying the customer through early & continuous delivery of valuable software. This is the highest value, and any process needs to respect and support this. The process is also there to support, not enslave, the people and teams.
• #35: Negative politics are an indicator of business leaders operating from dislike agendas. Dislike agendas are an indicator of organizational alignment issues.